This week I'm on my way to New York City to attend and co-present along with Trish McFarlane at the Conference Board's Senior Human Resources Executive Conference. The Senior Human Resources Conference this year has as its theme The Future of Work: Growth, Innovation, and People. The event takes place tomorrow, Tuesday November 15th, and Wednesday November 16th.
The Conference Board has organized a phenomenal set of sessions presented by a cross-section of the most accomplished Human Resources leaders from some of the world's largest organizations. Just a few of the companies that will be presenting their perspectives, philosophies, and strategies for adapting to this new world of work are Nike, Pitney Bowes, Abbott Laboratories, Boeing, American Express, and more.
With the really ambitious theme of 'The Future of Work', Trish and I plan to outline and discuss some of the ways organizations can and are leveraging social tools to foster growth, development, innovation, and give themselves an edge in an incredibly challenging and competitive market.
Trish and I are looking forward to attending and presenting, and if you could not make it to New York City to attend in person, you'll want to follow along virtually on Twitter on hashtag #TCBSRHR, and look for reports here, and on Trish's HR Ringleader blog.
But perhaps the best thing about the Senior HR Executive Conference is the unique and fantastic opportunity to meet, connect, and talk about the important issues facing some of the most senior Human Resources leaders at some of the largest companies in the world today. There are few events, at least ones that have agreed to let me attend, that offer this kind of access.
So since I get to spend a couple of days in this kind of company, I'll put it out there to you faithful readers.
If you could get a few minutes with the CHRO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you like to ask? What are the burning questions or comments you'd like to pass on? What do you think these senior HR leaders need to know?
Please share your ideas and comments, I promise I'll do my best to get the questions asked, and I'll share the answers I receive here.
Sort of an ambitious set of topics to take on over two short days, but as always The Conference Board has organized a phenomenal set of sessions presented by a cross-section of the most accomplished Human Resources leaders from some of the world's largest organizations. Just a few of the companies that will be presenting their perspectives, philosophies, and strategies for adapting to this new world of work are Nike, Pitney Bowes, Abbott Laboratories, Boeing, American Express, and more.
So despite the challenge of taking on a subject as lofty and potentially theoretical as 'The Future of Work', the quality and diversity of the sessions and the expertise of the collection of senior Human Resources leaders in attendance all but ensures that the discussions and knowledge sharing will be equal parts insightful and practical. The Senior Human Resources Conference has a justified reputation for assembling a group of the profession's top leaders and presenting engaging and relevant content to the attendees. And this time, with all of the sessions designed to give attendees insights into how work is changing, and how leading companies are innovating, improving and developing their organizations to compete in the next decade; the conference is shaping up to be a can't miss event.
This reputation for excellence makes me feel honored that The Conference Board has invited Trish and I to present a conference session titled 'How Social Tools Can Empower a Global Organization'. Trish and I plan to talk about how social networks, social technologies, and changing attitudes towards engagement, interaction, and connection are impacting and transforming how organizations communicate and engage with employees, candidates, and customers. We hope to get past the surface layer, and dig a little deeper into what these senior HR leaders should be thinking about as they consider how social tools can and will change the way traditional HR gets done inside organizations.
It's a big topic and it's an important one too, and while Trish and I won't profess to have all the answers, I am pretty confident the discussions with the assembled leaders in attendance will help all of us learn a little bit more from each other.
Thanks to the Internet's irrevocable laws of virality, you've probably seen, (or at least heard of), a clip from the comedian Louis C.K. titled 'Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy', (I'll embed the video at the end of this post for those that care to take a look. It is quite funny).
Louis' take is essentially that the incredible advances in all kinds of technology and levels of utility and convenience that these developments have enabled quickly progress from 'Wow! Isn't this amazing!' to 'Is that it? I'm totally bored.' in shorter and shorter cycles. In the video Louis compares our perceptions of modern air travel, which still should be considered a magical invention, (five hours from LA to NYC), to our still fairly recent history where a similar journey would take '30 years and some of you would die'.
But the nature of technology and of progress has always been such - once a standard is set, and the near term benefits of new invention are realized, (or at least generally understood, kind of an important distinction when it comes to enterprise technologies), most of us wonder what's next? Where, how, and from whose wisdom will the 'next big thing' spring from? It doesn't really matter if we, (sort of a collective we in this case, so don't get all 'I understand this space' on me. Thanks.), have not really completely or ecven adequately processed last year's set of 'next big things.' In the context of the recently concluded HR Technology Conference, we can talk for some time about this year's 'Cool New Technologies', but can you name one or two from last year? Can you name any from just two years ago?
We are driven in the technology field as participants, commentators, consumers, and leaders to continually search for the ideas and certainly the supporting and enabling solutions that can help transform our organizations and turn these great ideas into accepted enterprise practice, to better facilitate connection and innovation from our teams, and provide organizational leadership the information and insights derived from a more complete understanding of the performance and potential of the firm's people, (whew - I almost referred to 'people' as 'human capital', it was a close one), to achieve our organizational goals. I'd also be naive and optimistic to hope that one of those goals is to 'help our people be happy', but I'll leave that for another time.
So in the chase for 'what's next', it's easy to forget, or at least choose to not remember many of the things that led us to this place. And beyond that, we can often fail to appreciate and come close to extracting the potential of even 'older' technologies and solutions, caught up in the game of the latest gadgets, UX's, or smart marketing slogans.
All this really long (apologies) preamble was inspired by some things I have read or heard about the HR Tech Conference, and by proxy, the HR Technology market as a whole. Because if you feel, as I do, that the conference represents a kind of State of the Union event in the space, then what happens there, and what is said about it in the ensuing weeks probably represents an accurate and full assessment of the industry at a point in time. So when you catch the odd comment or blog post or two about people not being really blown away by any new solutions they saw, or that perhaps too many of the vendors are chasing each other's functionality around in circles, resulting in a mess of non-differentiated solutions, or even that some of the sessions seemed to present the same ideas from prior years, just packaged a bit differently - then I'm left to wonder and question if we've lost a little perspective of what is really happening inside most organizations, and the truth of the struggles many of them face with HR technologies every day. Never mind the fact that there were over 50 product announcements, some really exciting and interesting, presented at the show.
Why the HR Technology Conference is, as John Hollon at TLNT.com points out, one of the HR industry's two essential events to attend each year, is because it is much more than just fancy and showy displays of a new application or of the announcement of some new features added to an older application. The event is about taking measure of trends and ideas that are developing on a much broader level, cross-industry, global, and large in scope, but with the added advantage for attendees to start to think about how to apply and take advantage of these trends in almost real-time.
How can they manage this? Because the concurrent sessions present real stories of actual success from which to draw. Because their current vendor partners are almost certainly attending and exhibiting at the show, usually with many of their most senior executives on site. Because all of the top industry thinkers and consultants are there, most of whom are accessible for a conversation and exchange of ideas. This confluence of educational content, solution provider presence and attention, thought leadership, and top-caliber social and networking opportunities simply happens nowhere else in the industry.
Last point on all this is that many if not most of the benefits of attending the show for HR leaders and practitioners are not at all about the so-called 'latest and greatest'. Sure, the flashy new application that hits all the current buzzwords can be fun, interesting, and can even be really important, but remember - next year there will be another crop of 'latest and greatest', and we'll have to think hard to recall this year's winners. No, the real value of this gathering is far more enduring and important than making a bit of noise at a booth - it's about the rare opportunity to walk away from a three day event armed with new ideas, closer relationships with important partners, new and reinforced connections with peers and experts, and finally the chance to make positive and lasting impacts on your organization.
And we all know to do that takes time, great tools, insight, good ideas, and lots of help. The HR Technology Conference scores on all those measures.
Congratulations to Bill Kutik and the entire team at LRP for a fantastic event.
FYI - Here's the Louic C.K clip I mentioned at the top - email and RSS subscribers will need to click through - Have a great weekend!
Next week at the 14th Annual HR Technology Conference at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas I will have the privilege of participating in a panel discussion titled 'HR Technology's Second Annual Social Media Panel: Deploying Deep Social Strategies Without Destroying Your Career.'
It is no secret to anyone in Human Resources or in the enterprise technology space that 'social' needs to move past marketing buzzword and into demonstrable business value for most organizational leaders to take notice, to support social evangelists inside the organization, and to see the real benefits of deploying either social and collaborative technologies in-house, while opening up more fully and systematically to the use of outward facing social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in support of enterprise objectives. I'll bet 90% of the vendors you will see exhibiting at the HR Technology Conference will have some kind of 'social' angle in their solutions, (or at least in their marketing copy), but which ones make sense for you and your organization, and which ones look and feel like they simply bolted on some 'like' buttons and badges as an afterthought. It's not always easy to tell.
And then there is the 'personal' side of social for the HR professional - how can someone that has a day job with real responsibilities, deadlines, and managers to answer to still use social tools in a way that won't compromise their ability to perform, as well as act in concert with company-wide messaging and postioning that quite frankly, most HR people are not always so well-informed about. What happens when one of your employees, say a star engineer starts to gain popularity on his or her blog, has about 20,000 followers on Twitter, and starts getting asked to speak at events and do vendor webcasts?
Do you allow and support them in their 'micro-celebrity', or do you worry about tasks not getting completed while the young (or maybe not so young), emerging star is building his or her name. Can you accrue value from this activity back to the organization? Do you even know how?
Just because every vendor is talking about social, and just about every person at the Conference and who might be reading this blog is participating in social, (check the graph below for more color on this), hasn't made determining where and how social technologies and processes fit in a given organization's business model and processes any easier. And just because you finally convinced your VP of HR to join LinkedIn or get a Twitter account doesn't mean determining the right balance and relationship of your talent's personal brands and online presence any simpler.
So at the HR Technology Conference (our session is Tuesday October 4 at 11:00AM), our panel on social will certainly try to explore many of these topics, I am sure in 75 minutes we can't solve them all, (or any of them), but I think we will provide some good food for thought and give attendees some ideas they can begin to explore in their organizations.
Oh, and here is the chart I mentioned I'd share - just one data point among millions you have to consider when talking 'social'.
Source - Business Insider
Wow - 16% of all time spent online is now on Facebook. Hmm. Better quit reading this now and get back over there - I might have just tagged you in a picture!
Today is the final day of the ERE Expo recruiting conference in beautiful Hollywood, Florida (the picture to the right is the view from my room at about 6:15 this morning), and I will be spending another day hosting the HR Happy Hour Live Show on the conference's web stream. If you are interested at all in the recruiting/workplace/talent management space, you should try and tune in to the web stream today to catch not only some of the conversations we will be having with industry leaders and experts (Eric Winegardner from Monster.com, Heather Flynn from Nike, Ryan Healy from Brazen Careerist, to name just a few); but to also see and learn from the ERE keynote and general sessions.View from the 30th floor
One session, at about 9:15 AM, will be presented by United States Navy Commander Brent Phillips, about the Navy's recruiting strategies and approaches to engaging its community using social media and networking, as well as other more traditional techniques. I was fortunate to get a chance to meet and talk with Commander Phillips yesterday as part of the HR Happy Hour Live stream yesterday, and I can assure you based on the engaging and interesting conversation and preview of his session today that we had on the Happy Hour, that you will not want to miss the Commander's presentation.
Aside - I almost asked the Commander if we were far enough away from Cuba for him to be wearing the 'dress whites', but I thought the better of it. Seriously though, the Commander was a super guest and genuinely nice guy, so I be he would have let me slide.
When you talk to men and women like the Commander that have made the decision to serve their country, and who often and unfailingly place themselves at personal risk to safeguard and protect their country and their fellow citizens you realize (at least I did), that their service and commitment is too rare and incredible to take for granted. Whether it is military servicemen and women, local police, firefighters, and other emergency responders, heck, even the dedicated people that teach in our children's schools and drive the school buses; their collective concern and dedication to something bigger and more important to themselves is something we just can't recognize as much as we should.
With the upcoming 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks in just two days, we will see, hear, and think about these brave and noble men and women much more than we typically do. We will remember those that made the ultimate sacrifice on that day, and in the ensuing years, and we will honor those who continue to serve today. I hope that we will continue to honor and support them long after this anniversary on Sunday has passed, and we have returned our focus to our own busy jobs, lives, and families.
I have had a fantastic couple of days here at the ERE Expo in Florida. The venue is wonderful. The people are welcoming, intelligent, and engaging. I've learned a lot.
I am really lucky to be able to be here. And I'm also grateful to everyone who works in service to our country and our communities that I'm able to stare out at the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean on an impossibly beautiful September morning.
Steve
